Computers networks are drawing people towards forms of interaction and collaboration that were previously impractical. Music is one medium where computers can enable expression and collaboration by allowing persons to drive musical production solely through aesthetic musical control, leaving technical musical control to the computer.
The growing pervasiveness of computer networks may be shifting the emphasis of human communication from the transmission of objective to subjective information. As computers take over the tasks of storing, calculating, and tracking data, humans have increasingly used these networks to exercise personal, preference-driven agendas. This trend is driven by the ability of computers to create, transmit, and correlate subjective data across large numbers of persons.
Using computers, humans are freer to form electronically-connected groups in order to optimize the exchange of subjective information such as aesthetic and political views. When people use search engines like Google they avail themselves of a consensus gleaned from statistical calculations well beyond the ability of the average person, and which are unavailable to those who rely on non-electronic sources of information. Chat rooms and weblogs or “blogs” allow ideas and attitudes to evolve more rapidly now than when conversational discourse was constrained by physical proximity.
As social exchange becomes more concerned with personal expression than with the transmission of facts, it seems likely that interactive, non-verbal forms of expression, such as image sharing, music sharing, and game playing, will evolve to take advantage of the connections and data handling capabilities offered by computers. In other words, as humans more and more come to embody network nodes, they are more likely to exercise decision-making based on what-goes-with-what rather than what-means-what or what-is-what, Computer networks will provide for many evolving senses of contiguity based on participants distributed in unpredictable ways. This conjecture is based on the simple assumption that humans will take the path of least resistance to satisfy their personal goals, taking full advantage of the division of labor offered by computing, and is independent of more refined notions such as Postmodernism, “electronic villages”, etc.
Some forms of human expression, such as painting, poetry, and speech writing, tend to be privileged endeavors where one person with special skills prepares a self-contained work meant to be consumed by other persons who have the ability to appreciate but not necessarily produce such a work. Other forms of expression, such as conversation, fashion, and interior/exterior design, involve production skills possessed to some degree by most people, and these acts of expression can therefore occur in situations where the participants produce a collective result. In a given social setting it is not uncommon for conversation and attire to be constrained by a consensus among the participants as to the proper degree of formality and the prevailing areas of interest. In ordinary speech involving more than one speaker, each person generates responses based on remarks by others taking part in the conversation, and the conversation itself is collectively authored by all of its participants.
Music is primarily a privileged type of expression. Most people can recognize novel pieces of well-formed music, but additional training is required in order to produce well-formed music. When listening to music, humans have an innate sense of musical grammar that makes sense of musical structure. But the ability to engage musical grammar in personal expression requires control over harmonic and rhythmic structure that is beyond persons lacking specialized knowledge and practical experience. Jazz musicians, for instance, are capable of engaging in improvised musical “conversations” based on years of musical training. More typically, the disparate parts that constitute a musical work are the product of a single composer. If human speech capabilities were on a par with music capabilities, then most humans would merely listen to individual speakers expressing speech-like texts.
Fashion is an example of more participatory expression. Persons with a shared fashion sense often congregate in clubs or other settings where each person's individual clothing choices becomes part of a larger scene. That scene takes on a certain character based on the ways in which those individual choices echo or complement each other. The overall effect is generated collectively by the participants, as well as the various designers from which those participants made their fashion choices.
Computers and computer networks can enable music to graduate from a privileged form of expression to a more participatory one. This is achieved by removing the barrier to musical production: the fact that most people have an innate sense of musical grammar when it comes to hearing music, but not when it comes to producing music. Many aspects of musical grammar can be objectively described, and therefore tasked to a computer. This division of labor leaves the human listener free to guide musical production based solely on subjective decisions made during the listening process.
Music is an ideal medium for expressing contiguous relations rather than symbolic relations, which are the domain of language. As human expression evolves towards transmission of aesthetics and attitudes, leaving computers to work out the objective concerns, perhaps non-symbolic forms of expression such as music will overtake language as the primary avenue for human information exchange. Computer-enabled musical production would allow for music to be created in a distributed manner, as is already the case with conversation and fashion. Participants could inject ad-hoc musical elements to be integrated into a coherent whole by well-formed constraints applied by computers. Music can then evolve and form new styles, reaching various levels of consensus, that might have ever occurred in the hands of individual composers, musicians, or producers.
Therefore, it would be ideal if one could develop a music modification system and related methods wherein musical scores or pieces can be created, analyzed, varied, hybridized, manipulated, otherwise modified or a combination thereof to create new and/or different musical scores and pieces in a systematic and straight-forward manner such that anyone who loves music can participate in the process.